Daniel Rakowitz

Daniel Paul Rakowitz is an American murderer and cannibal.

He was born in 1960 in Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, where his father was a criminal investigator for the U.S. Army. The Rakowitz family moved to Rockport, Texas sometime in the late 1970s. Daniel Rakowitz graduated from Rockport-Fulton High School in 1980.^{[citation needed]} Although it is commonly reported that Rakowitz graduated from a Rockport high school, he actually attended and graduated from high school in Refugio, Texas.^{[citation needed]}

He moved to New York City around 1985.^{[citation needed]} Rakowitz, an eccentric well known to his East Village neighbors as a marijuana dealer and owner of a pet rooster, founded his own religion - the Church of 966.^[1]

In 1989, he walked around the East Village around Tompkins Square Park bragging to some of the people he believed were his disciples that he had killed his roommate and girlfriend, Monika Beerle, a Swiss student at the Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance, and a dancer at Billy's Topless. By his own confession, he dismembered her body in the bathtub, boiled the parts, and served some of her remains in the form of a soup to the homeless in nearby Tompkins Square Park.^[2][3] He said that he had boiled her head and made soup from her brain. He had tasted it and liked it, and thereafter he referred to himself as a cannibal. At least one of the people to whom he told his tale went to police.^{[citation needed]} Rakowitz was arrested shortly thereafter, and led the police to the Port Authority Bus Terminal storage area, where he had stored her skull and teeth.^[4]

On February 22, 1991, a New York jury found Rakowitz, then 31 years old, not guilty by reason of insanity for the killing of his roommate on August 19, 1989.^[5] In 2004, a jury found Rakowitz no longer dangerous but decided that he is still mentally ill and should remain at the Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center on New York City's Wards Island.^{[citation needed]}

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